• 172 •


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she didn’t need to be at the awards ceremony and she wasn’t. Other than their discussion in her tent last night, Caroline had successfully avoided Shannon for most of the week. She prayed her luck had not run out. She still had no idea what to do with her feelings for Shannon going forward.

Looking through the peephole, Caroline sighed, unlocked, and opened the door. “Hey,” was her greeting as Fran walked into the room.“Hey yourself. Where’d you run off to? We looked for you at the party. Your parents sent me on the search mission.” She hesitated. “You okay?”

Caroline didn’t want to get into it with Fran. She was physically tired, emotionally exhausted, and for one frightening moment she thought she was going to cry. She’d made her views known, told Shannon to leave her alone, never speak to her again. How could she go back to her now? She was going to cry over Shannon Roberts. Been there, done that, and she was going to do it again and again.

“Yeah, fine. Just a little tired.” Caroline busied herself with opening her bottle of water. She offered one to Fran who shook her head as she plopped in the chair by the small desk. She knew Fran well enough to read her body language and Fran had just settled in for a long, probing interrogation.

“Come on, Caroline.”

Caroline crossed the room and pulled the curtains to shut out the setting sun. She took a long moment before turning and facing Fran.

“There is nothing to talk about. We got together for old time’s sake. She moved on and so have I.” It was a rather succinct explanation.

It was the truth. At least the first two parts. She was going to have to work on the third.

“And?” Fran wasn’t going to accept her explanation at face value.“And nothing. It happened, and it won’t happen again.” Caroline didn’t know if she was trying to convince Fran or herself. She kept talking to do both. “I don’t fit in her life and she definitely doesn’t fit in mine.”

“What does that mean?”

“Come on, Fran, you know what I’m talking about. We haven’t

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said more than three things to each other in ten years. Other than riding her bike and sleeping with more women than I even know, I have no idea what she does with her life. And it doesn’t matter. It was just a trip down memory lane. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“You are so full of shit. How do you even stand yourself?” Fran hadn’t moved or even raised her voice. “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.

I’ve seen the way you can’t keep your eyes off her. You knew every minute of every day where Shannon was this week. And you wanted to be with her. Just admit it and stop pretending she doesn’t still mean something to you.”

“Shut up, Fran,” Caroline said louder than she intended. “Just shut up. You have no idea what I want and certainly not what I’m thinking. The season is over. I’ve done what I wanted to do. I won the championship. I’m the best rider in the world. Now it’s time to grow up and be a big girl. In three weeks, I’ll be standing in front of six people who will judge me like I have never been judged before. They will control whether or not I get to do what I’ve always dreamed of. Those men will have my future in the palms of their pompous, fat, little hands.

I don’t need any more pressure right now and I certainly don’t need any more shit about Shannon Roberts, so please just shut the fuck up.”

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Descent

ChaPTER TwENTy-ThREE

Shannon smoothed the nonexistent wrinkles out of her pants and centered the gleaming silver buckle on her belt. She was more nervous than she expected to be. She still wasn’t sure why she was here. She had nothing in common with these people except for the fact that they had gone to the same school ten years ago. She hadn’t spoken to any of them since the day Caroline’s father walked into Caroline’s room and changed Shannon’s life forever. If not for the pictures in Facebook, she probably wouldn’t recognize any of the people here if they walked past her on the street. It still wasn’t too late to turn around and leave. And do what? Go back to her empty hotel room and drink? Worse yet, think, remember? She’d been doing enough of that lately, especially the drinking part. Whoever said drinking washed away sadness never had her heart broken by Caroline Davis.

The tastefully ornate sign indicated the Grand Ballroom was to her left. The lobby of the Marriott Royale Resort was as stuffy and pretentious as she remembered from the time she and her parents stayed there when they had come to visit the campus of Mount Holyfield. Good God, was it almost fifteen years ago when they had spent the weekend touring and interviewing with the administration and faculty? For a moment Shannon wondered if Dean Phillips would be in attendance.

What would she say to her now?

Subdued music led her to the large room decorated with balloons—green and white, the school colors of MHA. A large sign that read WelcOMe aluMni hung over the wide double doors. People floated in and out of the room chatting and laughing, many of them holding champagne glasses.

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Shannon hung back observing the scene. The women were immaculately dressed in an assortment of cocktail dresses and evening wear. They were all thin, almost to the point of being emaciated, and made up to the point of being comical. More than one pair of surgically enhanced breasts passed in front of her.

The men were equally stylish. Some had donned tuxedos for the event, others simply wore dark suits with conservative power ties. They were as tan as if they had just stepped off the tennis court or a week on a yacht. The people and the place reeked of old money, superficial smiles, and air kisses. And what in the hell was she doing in the middle of it? She had absolutely no idea but kept putting one foot in front of the other.

Unclenching her fists, Shannon walked to the registration table.

Three women way too perky to be for real greeted her. “Hello, welcome to our reunion. Your name?” The women looked at her, searching her face for anything that would jog their memories for Shannon’s name.

Shannon knew there were many memories. She was the proverbial bad girl and she was certain her last week at MHA had become a legend.

“Shannon Roberts.” Shannon watched as the woman with hair too dark to be natural recognized her name. She looked her up and down as if searching for any sign that the scandal that had forced her out of Mount Holyfield was still clinging to her. The other woman squinted as if she couldn’t see Shannon clearly without the glasses she probably refused to wear.

“Here you are. Shannon Roberts. My, you haven’t changed a bit,”

she said looking between Shannon and the picture on her name tag. She finally handed it to her.

“Thanks.” Shannon glanced at the picture and cringed. God, she hoped she didn’t still look like that.

“We’re in the room to the right. Dinner is at seven, the program starts at eight, and dancing after that. Did you bring a guest?”

Shannon barely recognized there was a question in the high-pitched chatter from the woman. “No,” she replied and stepped toward the door to her past.

Ten years, she repeated to herself. She hadn’t given MHA anything more than a passing thought since the day she left. Now she was expected to mix and mingle with women she had barely spoken

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with in high school and make inane small talk with their husbands. She seriously doubted that any of the other lesbians at MHA would be in attendance with their girlfriends. But then again neither was she.

Snagging a glass of champagne from a passing waiter, Shannon stepped further into the crowded room. Several heads turned her way and she vaguely recognized a few faces. But they knew who she was.

The expressions on their faces told her as much. After the incident with Caroline’s father, a few of her friends had managed to get in touch with her. Her absence hadn’t gone unnoticed and she was the subject of just about every conversation on campus. Rumors were rampant. She had heard they included everything from stories that she ran off with a college coed from Tufts University in Boston to suggestions that she was pregnant. Shannon had had a good laugh over that one.

Shannon expected this when she had RSVP’d to the reunion committee chairman that she would be attending. She had checked the box, licked the envelope, and dropped it in the corner mailbox the week after she’d returned from Australia. In the weeks since, she had hashed and rehashed her decision and at the last minute almost didn’t come.

She was getting dressed when a case of second thoughts crashed in on her. Why was she going? Did she have something to prove? To whom?

Herself? Dean Phillips? The other members of her senior class? She was a graduate just like they were, even if she didn’t walk down the aisle to the tune of “Pomp and Circumstance.” She deserved to be here.

Shannon had asked herself those questions plus a few hundred more in the days leading up to tonight. She was no closer to an answer now that she was here than when she was sitting on her deck last week in Big Bear. She was as much alone then as she was right now.

Before she had a chance to contemplate her state of mind any further she was grabbed from behind and spun around and ended up face-to-face with Marci McMillan. Marci with an i, as she always said when she introduced herself, was at least thirty pounds lighter and had much larger breasts than the last time Shannon had seen her.